Are AI Churches A Cult of the Future Religion?

For those who were born in the 1990s going back, a teacher would enter any class in the U.S. and ask this question, “In the beginning, dash,” and chances were, 90 percent of students would lift their hands ready to respond. The answer you’d most likely receive was, “God created the world!” But, the big question now is, will this belief continue to have the same impact on the current or future generations — especially now that AI (artificial intelligence) and its future technologies seem to be the center of everything?

As in, experts have made us believe that intelligent agents will one day decide who lives and who dies. “Robots will drain our blood and eat us raw if we’ll not comply,” – they say. Could this be the reason why now a section of humanity has begun to worship AI? Anthony Levandowski founded The Way of the Future, now supposed to be the world’s first religion that worships AI, a concept that again raises the below question:

Must Humans Worship Something?

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According to psychology experts, it’s been proven that humans are wired to place their belief in something more stronger than them. For instance, some societies in the Asia world have shrines where they go to plead with their gods, in Africa and Egypt certain tribes have a culture, inherited from the ancient world that binds them to worship particular trees, caves, or sculptures.

In the civilized world, there are those who believe in having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through The Way of The Cross, while others follow the steps of Prophet Muhammad as their center of religion. What about atheism? That’s another form of religion, in fact, a belief in self-intelligence, which is nothing less like trusting in artificial intelligence (just that one version is self and the other is artificial intelligence. All these simply means no matter the level of modernization humans experience, religion remains a key aspect of society.

The Current Position of AI as a God

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Besides Anthony Levandowski, there comes Bentinho Massaro, a former big G employee, whom we can term as the apostle and founder of another “AI worshiping congregation,” that can’t wait to hear his stories of how artificial intelligence will be supreme. On his topic about True Simultaneity, Massaro already commands a following of over 65,000 YouTube subscribers.

Now mark this, we are talking of subscribers here, which means when he’s “preaching” the message goes to thousands of his fans. Adding to the figures, Massaro is also being followed by over 300,000 people on Facebook, literary pushing his crowd to close to half a million followers.

Okay, Massaro and Levandowski aside for a moment let’s look into AI worship from another perspective. As in, how fast is this concept growing? For one, researchers are almost giving up their lives, working day and night just to make milestones in machine intelligence discoveries. Experts like, say, Elon Musk and other tech giants have soaked into the concept of future cars that would talk, see or even feel like humans do. The tech has become the center of interest worldwide.

In other words, enthusiasts can’t wait to hear what next machine intelligence will do, making the tech the most important thing in their lives – which ideally is exactly what worship entails (looking to something or someone more powerful to trust upon for help and solutions).

Let’s spiritualize this a bit, just a week ago, researchers created an algorithm they say can predict when patients would die. But here is the clash, it’s in the culture of people all over the world that life is divine and nobody really knows when it should end, that’s why doctor’s predictions of say, a cancer patient remains with six or weeks to live often miss. In other words, AI technology, in this case, seems to rise above that. Posing as superior to the doctors, now relating to that and bearing the fact that so far the black box and how it works remains a misery, it’s obvious that ignorant brains might be trapped to believe AI dictates life.

Invention Concepts that Would Support AI Worship

Source: technewshere

Some cults already believe in the existence of the goddess of sex, the god of security and so on. Like in Hinduism, when calamities hit, faithfuls would pray to one of their gods in the concerned department to assist. Now, here is AI, already people have come up with humanoid, responsive robots that could play the role of the opposite sex in a relationship.

On the other hand, sooner than later, the US will be depending on AI for most of its security mechanism — that is, monitoring the adversary to predict possible attacks and so on. But here is the catch, it’s possible that some people will take advantage of the ignorant minds to build cults that pay reverence to AI.

In fact, as of now, the belief is that artificial intelligence is the future of everything including who ascends to power, (maybe the Russians who were said to use AI to vote in the current U.S. President can elaborate on that).

Saito is a born writer with a passion for crafting "how-to" articles, and sharing tech and innovation news hitting our universe. He’s been doing it for over 5 years now. Besides working as a freelancer –handling several clients, he’s a loving husband to a gorgeous wife.